Search Diversification in Local Search Heuristic Algorithms

What is search diversification? And typical search diversification techniques used in literature.

Photo by Meriç Dağlı on Unsplash

When we apply local search heuristic algorithms to solve optimization problems, sometimes additional elements have to be included in the search strategy to make the algorithms more effective.

In the previous article, we introduced one of the elements, search intensification, to improve the algorithms' efficiency. In this article, let us see another element that is often used, i.e. search diversification.

1. Why is search diversification necessary?

One of the main problems of all algorithms based on local search methods is that they tend to be too local. That is to say, they spend most of their time on searching solutions in a restricted portion of the search space.